Ringing the village bell ONCE should gather them together.

Have you ever find it annoying that villagers can be all over the place?

Even though there are workstations now, villagers can pick workstations across the village and you have no way to find them.

It also gets harder to protect the villagers from zombies or pillagers.

So my suggestion is that if you ring the village bell ONCE, all villagers will gather around that area, as a social interaction area. If you ring it many times in a row, the villagers take it as a warning of a raid and run away.

This makes it easier to gather your villagers across the village without confining them to small trading hall spaces, while reducing the annoyance of an open-trading format.